ME: Since always? I mean, I don’t have time to date, but I’m not gay.
REGGIE: You sure?
I know she’s just messing with me.
ME: Reg …
REGGIE: All right, all right. What do you want to know for anyway?
ME: I just do! Are you going to help me or not?
REGGIE: Relax, lover boy. I’m just tugging your chain. Eliana Hoffman. She has like a hundred brothers and sisters and her dad used to own the video store in the strip mall by the post office. It went out of business about five years after the world started streaming. I guess some people just don’t see the writing on the wall.
ME: Doesn’t your uncle own a bookstore?
I don’t get to tweak Reggie often, so I take advantage when I do.
REGGIE: Shut your face, Digrindakis. Books are different.
ME: So what else? What’s Eliana into?
REGGIE: idk … She doesn’t talk to a whole lot of people. Really, she seems like a grade-A nobody. Can’t you find a girl with a little more spunk?
ME: Who says I’m trying to find a girl at all.
REGGIE: Hmm.
ME: Anything else?
REGGIE: There is one thing. She hangs out with this girl named Janina.
ME: The really tall girl? I think she’s in our European Studies class.
REGGIE: If you mean the Amazonian nerd who wastes her time at beauty school and has really big tits, yeah, that’s her.
Reggie knows I hate it when she talks like that. I guess at the end of the day, I’m kind of a prude. I need to get over that if I’m going to be a rock star.
REGGIE: Maybe she can help you. Hey, I gotta run. I’m playing Destiny in five and my squad has a massive raid planned. Good luck, Romeo.
And Reg is gone. She does that, sort of blinks in and out of the frame. Hey! That’s a film metaphor! I’ll have to use that in Mr. Tannis’s class.
Anyway, maybe I’ll talk to Janina tomorrow. Thankfully European Studies is before film class, which means I can be ready for Eliana. I have no idea what to say, so we’ll see if I even take that step.
I close the laptop, put on my earbuds, tell Siri to play Titus Andronicus, and drift off to sleep thinking about Eliana as “To Old Friends and New” wafts into my brain.
Eliana
Some mornings I want to pretend my closet is a TARDIS and fly into outer space.
It starts around five thirty A.M., when the pipes squeak on for my mom’s prework shower. After that, Samara destroys any hope that I will fall back asleep by turning on the outer bedroom light in order to get ready for swim practice. I used to stuff dirty clothes underneath the door crack, but somehow her putting on a bathing suit also requires her crashing into my closet door multiple times until she has sufficiently shimmied the skintight nylon over her body. I envy the ease with which she walks practically naked in public every day. Not that I want to be naked in public, but you get to a point when being in a bathing suit is a whole thing instead of just the outfit you wear in the water. I feel the same way about gymnasts and leotards. Maybe when you’ve participated in a sport since childhood, it doesn’t faze you to wear so little in front of so many eyes. The only sport I’ve ever played professionally (and by professionally, I mean for three meets my freshman year) was badminton. I loved the slow-motion action of the game. I sometimes won. That’s when my friends were still my friends, and we joined stuff together. I still don’t understand how they justify to themselves that we aren’t friends anymore. It’s like they blamed me for my chemical makeup. It’s not my fault things affect me the way they do. At least that’s what my mom tells me. And if meds make me better, isn’t that akin to a disease, like diabetes or high blood pressure? No one breaks up with their friends because of diabetes.
Friggin’ depression.
Mornings and nights hit me the worst. At bedtime, it’s dark and my brain turns on me. Mornings are rough because that’s when you remember the things that made the day before difficult. You wake up, and there’s a feeling: Something sucks. Maybe something is going to happen, and you have that sensation in your gut because that’s how things always go. Or maybe something already happened, and sleep erased it for those eight hours or so. Then you wake up, feel okay for five seconds, until it hits you: Things already suck. Today I feel like that. My stomach gurgles with unease as I remember the pileup from gym class and my wussy exit. I know I have to say something in film class because if I don’t, then I’m an even bigger wuss. I am not a fan of confrontation, but I also would rather confront my demons than let them fester.
Which leads me to think of Uncle Fester from The Addams Family, his bald head and buggy eyes, and I get all wigged out and eject myself from bed at rapid speed. I slam open my closet door, knocking over my sister, on one leg during her swimsuit routine, and she crashes to the floor.
Is this my new thing?
“Christ on a cracker!” Samara yells. Samara enjoys swearing like a seventy-five-year-old churchgoing granny.
“Sorry, dude. Have to pee,” I blabber my apology as I beeline into the bathroom. It wasn’t a lie. Who doesn’t have to pee first thing in the morning? And if she didn’t want me awake, she shouldn’t have pounded into my door in the first place.
Mornings.
In the kitchen I pour Alpha-Bits and some blueberries into bowls for me and my two youngest siblings. It’s the only sugary cereal my mom deems acceptable because of the possibility of learning something from the letters outweighing the sugar content. It’s fast and easy, and it tastes only slightly sweeter than wood chips. I barely notice as I hoover it into my mouth and fret over having to make it through periods one and two before I can save myself from internal combustion upon entering film class during period three. My brain whirs as I go through the motions of morning routine: brush my teeth, tell my sibs fifteen times to brush their teeth, ensure my sibs have their lunch money, double-check my backpack for my schoolwork, get the sibs on the bus, walk to school.
On my way into the school building, I run into Daisy King. Daisy was my closest friend in second through fourth grade and part of the pack of girls I ran with in middle school. She was also the first of the friends to break it off with me after my shitshow that was the middle of freshman year. It’s amazing how three weeks in a mental hospital can make such a difference in a friendship.
It’s always a battle: Do I stare her down so she acknowledges what a buttress she was? Or do I walk past as though she does not exist to me anymore? She makes it easy by awkwardly (and obviously) pretending she has an important matter on her phone to attend to. Predictable.
After dropping off my bag at my locker, I meet Janina in our spot in the foyer near the vending machines. It isn’t technically our spot, since half the school buys their breakfast with coins, but it has been one of the nice consistencies in my life since I started high school. Janina eats a bag of peanut M&Ms every day for breakfast. I don’t know if my stomach could handle that, but she swears the peanuts are healthy. She is a goddess, so who am I to question her choice? Today she sports new purple highlights.
“I like your hair,” I tell her, as she rips the candy bag open with her teeth and drinks in the contents.
“Thanks,” she spits with a mouthful of chocolate mess. “It was supposed to be red.”